Intel's 955X Chipset

With pricing out of the way, let's have a look at the 955X chipset itself. The Intel slide below provides a good overview of the chipset:

For the most part, the features are pretty straightforward, but there are a few interesting points. Note that Intel shows support for dual PCI Express x16 slots with the use of an external bridge, meaning that motherboard manufacturers could effectively offer SLI support on 955X platforms. We firmly believe that Intel will introduce support for SLI once both ATI and NVIDIA have introduced their SLI technologies. It has yet to be seen how Intel will implement this bridged dual x16 solution and whether it will be a true dual x16 setup, or two x8 slots like NVIDIA's SLI.

The board that we used for this review actually featured two x16 slots, but only one was a true x16 slot - the other was a x4 slot with a x16 connector.

I think Questar is cramitpals nemisis..
Quester I work for Intel, even Intel knows that the prescott has heat issues, and that for most applications right now, AMD is winning in price/performance...having to use water cooling to get a chip to run at stock speed without throttling is a pretty major heat issue if you ask me..even a thermalright XP-120 couldn't keep my 3.4 prescott from throttling at stock speeds, my 3.2 ES, and 2.8 didn't have as much of an issue, but some of the prescotts are running WAY too hot..Reply

Well... it would be pretty stupid of a company to not roll with the punches. I'd rather see them shape their direction as they have that be rigid (which means they wouldn't compete anymore).

The reason no one jumped at 64bits in x86 land is because the volume of 64bit processors out there wasn't worth the effort. So... 100,000 64bit systems are out there... compare that with over 1000X that number of 32bit only systems. Which would you target if you were developing software? Now that 64bit will be mainstream, the market will move that way.

In addition, mom/pop won't see any real benefit from 64bit. There will be marginal speed benefits to having more general purpose registers, but that would have been the case in 32bit land. I doubt they are doing things that require more than 4G of memory, either. The only other real speed benefits are when you are manipulating 64bit integers and there just aren't that many apps that mom/pop use that need that kind of range.

I like AMD as well (all 5 of my personal desktops have them) but I'm not a blind follower. It's nice to be excited about technology but don't let it become a religion. If Intel released a better processor than AMD, I wouldn't hesitate to buy those instead.Reply

I'll stop you from having to post a link to Gateway, or somebody even smaller. They don't provide the services we contract for when we buy systems. Again, it's about the entire system, and everything that is wrapped around it.Reply

And I assume that means that in your companies infinite wisdom that AMD processors could never be qualified in such a way and even though AMD has tried to convince your company otherwise, you don't think it is the right time to stop kissing Intel's ass.

You don't by any chance work for a little company called Dell do you?Reply

For example, I know exactly when my current desktop system is going end of life, and I know what product will replace it. We will have POC units in our labs for our desktop engineering people to work with about 90 days before GA. They will buld the OS image for the systems, do extensive application testing, standardize the bios version and config (our PC vendor ships our systems preconfigured to our specifications). Everything that's different about the system from a technician standpoint will be documented. (Such as if you replace a system board, this is how to program the bios with the systems' asset tag). Our management systems will be updated with any changes that are needed to support the new systems.

In the interim, I'll stock up with about a thousand units of the old system to bridge over the transition (four week supply). This is SOP for any large corporation. Every Fortune 500 that has centralized IT functions do it this way.

This allows me to plan the resources that are needed to transition to the new system.Reply